Pages

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

What is a Landing Page?

A landing page is any page of a website where visitors arrive (or "land").

This means that every page is as important as the next, and should be treated as such. In other words, if a link from a search engine takes someone to your site and the page where they land is poorly formatted and does not provide the right information the person is looking for, they will—most likely—hit the "back" button on their browser thus returning to the search engine to either click the next link or to search again.

That's referred to as a "bounce," and it is a bad signal to search engines since, in essence, the data they collect tells them that the page they are sending people to does not provide the right information.

If, after studying your analytics program, you are able to ascertain that certain pages have high bounce rates (50% or higher), then you need to study those pages, one by one, and determine what may be causing the problem.

I would start by making sure the title and description META tags have the correct information. The same applies to the keywords META tag, if you use one. Beyond that make sure the contents of the page itself actually have the correct information and that the pictures correspond to the subject matter.

You control the contents of your site 100%. Therefore, you are responsible for insuring visitors get the right information.